SlingPlayer For iPhone Is Going 3G

It seems all the hate talk that AT&T has received in the past few months is finally paying off as the company seems to be more open to new innovative solutions for iPhone. Sling Media’s iPhone app is one of those solutions. If you have ever wanted to watch your TV from a remote location or over your home network, you have probably heard of Sling. SlingPlayer is not a new app by any means. Sling Media developed the app a while ago, but the app was restricted to WiFi only by AT&T. It seems after Sling Media’s complaint to the FCC and AT&T testing the app for a few months already, the company is ready to allow it to work over 3G as well.

The FCC was fast to respond to AT&T’s decision to let SlingPlayer go 3G. After all, it may have played a role in AT&T’s decision to reverse its course:

AT&T’s announcement is a step in the right direction. Consumers benefit from mobile video choice

Sling Media is happy with the decision as well. After all, the company is all about giving consumers more options when it comes to watching TV. But is AT&T shooting itself in the foot by becoming more lenient towards bandwidth-intensive apps such as Slingplayer?

If you are not familiar with AT&T’s network issues, you probably haven’t been using your iPhone enough. The quality of service is not as high as it should be and dropped calls and lousy connections have been experienced by many iPhone owners. The good news is that AT&T is investing more money in its infrastructure to improve its quality of service. But can the company keep up with all the new apps and devices that it’s picking up?

Remember how AT&T was planning to punish users who used a lot of bandwidth on their iPhone? That didn’t go down too well with AT&T customers, and AT&T did backpedal a bit on that. The company may now have no choice other than going in that direction. The iPad is making its debut in a matter of weeks. That’s going to put a huge amount of pressure on AT&T’s network. Apps such as SlingPlayer won’t help either. Unless AT&T has all of sudden gotten new network capabilities, I am not sure how the company is going to handle the new load. Let’s hope AT&T knows what it is doing.